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How to Turn a Dream Into a Workable Plan

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

As a coach, it can be difficult to watch the lack of progress of so
many promising entrepreneurs and coaches. They’ve dreamed for so long about
creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet, all they do is dream.

You know the people I’m talking about. They attend conferences, sign
up for free webinars, buy paid training, and sometimes even work with a coach
or two. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, they fail
to make any progress toward their dreams.

Are they just lazy? No. It’s something worse. They don’t know how to
move from a dream to a plan and they’re stuck.

Start With the
Long-Term

If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, “Where do you
want to be five years from now,” you might have thought it an odd question. But
as a business owner, that might just be the most important consideration you
can have.

Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible
to create a map to get there.

You need to know what your destination is, so
that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure
you’re still headed in the right direction.

Create Milestones

Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for
getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.

For example, if in five years you want to be free to travel for 8
weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can
happen:

·Enough income to cover travel costs

·Passive income to sustain your business while
you’re not working

·A staff who can manage the business while you’re
away

With this list, you can then work backwards from your five-year goal,
and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $150,000
annually in order to fund your travel plans, and right now you’re earning
$60,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this:

·Year 1: $70,000

·Year 2: $85,000

·Year 3: $105,000

·Year 4: $125,000

·Year 5: $150,000

With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly
what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily
goals.

Create Small Goals

If you say to someone, you need to move from $60,000 to $150,000 in
five years, that’s a pretty overwhelming task. After all, it’s a $90,000
increase and most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as
impossible.

But when you break it down as we have above, and then again into
smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t look so daunting.

In the first year of the plan we have outlined here, your income needs
to increase only by $10,000.

That’s less than $1000 per month! Surely that’s
easy enough to accomplish!

You can further break that down by week: $1000 per month is just $250
per week. If you sell just one more group coaching package, or five more of a
$50 training program, you’ve already reached your milestone.

That might mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an
additional $20 per month in Facebook ads, or perhaps reaching out to one more
JV partner. The point is, reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than
thinking about that five-year plan.

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable
milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks?

If you can do
this (and you definitely can) then you can achieve anything in business and in
life.